Why the Games I’ve Developed Never Have a Chance

Ah, the title is advice I should be giving myself on a daily basis. I’m definitely one of those people who start projects only later to tell myself that it’s shit and I shouldn’t bother with it. It’s exactly why I say that I’m starting stuff here, and then post a little bit about it and then you never hear anything about it later. It drives me crazy because this literally affects just about everything I do.

I would never want to be responsible for something that even remotely resembles this abortion of a game.

In case you didn’t know, I am an university-educated and qualified game programmer. I’m just really terrible at the artwork. In my opinion, I’m not such a good pen and pencil artist. I can model things in 3D, but I feel like to do that, someone would have to be standing behind me with a razor blade on a toothbrush. I always have a half-assed general idea of how I want a character to look. What I focus more on is the story behind the character. What’s his or her motivation? What do they like or hate doing? How clear is their thinking? Are they in it for themselves, no one, or someone else? What is their relationship with others? Are they inclined to pick and eat mysterious forest fruit while they look for cemeteries?

I’ve been pretty proud of myself when it comes to my character designs and game development designs in general. I’m just really bad with the graphics and well, that’s enough to kill my motivation to keep working on it. The ideas are always there, but when it comes to the detailed character design, I’m hopeless. It keeps me from moving forward with the game in general.

In my spare time, I’ve been coding games where the character, in my opinion, is soulless. They don’t have a back story. He doesn’t have any motivation. The main character runs around and shoots things. He jumps over holes in the ground. He’s like a male version of Samus Aran with no motivation except to kill meat-hungry plants and animals. It’s not something I’m proud of because I feel like you must have that connection to the guy/girl/thing you’re controlling. Without it, I feel like games are useless. If there’s not a moment where you feel sorry for or you’re proud of your character, then it’s a total waste. If I made something and made it publicly available and the character or characters were shit, I’d be incredibly ashamed.

I feel like these are some of the things I need to work on but since game development (or IT work) is no longer something I do full-time, I just fit it into the very little free time I have. I don’t even know if anything will come out of it and right now, I don’t feel like this thing will ever see the light of day outside my office space.

I’ve thought about getting a group of people together to work on a fully developed story of mine, but I need a lot more money to make it happen and I’m not a huge fan of e-begging for money. I don’t want to waste my time, but I do believe in my ideas. I just need more people onboard, which I know how to initiate, but I just need to believe in myself a little more.